Hunger Eats the Human Whole
by CleotheDreamer
Summary: 'It is not so terrible of the insane to go insane in the first place.' In which Harry's Horcrux can speak and Harry gets raised by a psychopath.


**Summary: 'It is not so terrible of the insane to go insane in the first place.' In which Harry's Horcrux can speak and Harry gets raised by a psychopath. OR: The juxtaposition to Harry raising Tom.**

**AN: This is really dark folks! It's graphic and addresses the insanity of a semi-feral child. *WARNINGS*: gore, ideation of murder, self-harm, mentions of cannibalism, violence, madness, starvation, and referenced, but not explicit, child abuse.**

**This is if the Horcrux had more of an influence on Harry's mental state and the opposite of fics that have Harry raise Tom.**

* * *

Harry heard a voice whisper words - whisper things in the dark of night and day because darkness followed him everywhere. Darkness was his constant. How could they expect the light to shine so bright from a boy born and bred in shadow with violence in his head? With murder swimming in his eyes?

The voice whispered, whispered hate and hurt and told him the best ways to scare others away - because if they didn't like him, then fine, they'd just have to be scared of him. He wouldn't let them bruise his skin when he could rip apart their flesh without touching them, without even leaving a scar.

Harry spent weeks in the shadows peeling apart his skin - his soul - gnashing his teeth in a futile attempt to stave off hunger and the voice laughed. Said 'this is what people call raising a child' they call them 'good guardians'. It laughed and laughed and Harry swore he would never be good because Uncle Vernon was 'good' and Aunt Petunia was 'good' and he had never known so much hate besides towards them.

Good was a lie built on false propriety and bloodlust deceptions.

The ache in his stomach burned and his emaciated body slowly clawed and clawed for something - anything - to eat, to savage, to tear to pieces under sharpened teeth. And the voice, the murder in his head, crooned comforts, spun tales of death and torture and he smiled, content in his violence.

When released from the dark, his home of small dimensioned comfort, the voice said to rip their throats out, to flick his wrist and tear apart their sinewed muscles and shatter their bones to pieces. To roast them in a fire and devour them for his hunger was so all-encompassing - so overpowering - that he was willing to lose what little humanity he had to sate it.

But the voice laughed when he pounced, saying 'not yet, Harry. You haven't had your first taste of raw meat yet.' and so Harry broke the necks of rabbits and tore apart flesh and skin, chewing it and spitting it out, the voice encouraging him all the way.

He knows they'd say that the voice was evil and dark but he was a boy shrouded in fear and pain; he knew evil and this voice wasn't. This voice of murder and pain, of retribution and vengeance, was his savior, his sweet redemption - his twisted guardian angel.

God knew no one else made his hunger abate, made his bruises pale away, made him into a mockery of happy - gave him some version of love no matter how gnarled and broken. Yes, the voice was his savior and he would do anything for the voice.

The voice he called Tom.

Harry was a boy of dreams to them, just a pillar of pretend goodness. But madness was an intoxicating force and insanity was not so bad that he condemned it. No, they were not ready to face the monster they created. But really, what made him a monster in the first place?

He was a boy of survival, of learning how to hate in order to be loved. He was a boy of raw meat stuck between jagged teeth and bitten fingernails on flayed skin.

(Now, Dear Reader, I know I'm supposed to leave you to these thoughts and let you privately come to your own conclusion of the meaning of my words, but I don't like that idea one bit. You may think and churn in your self-proclaimed goodness, condemning and screeching your woes, but this is life and life is gritty and filled with hate.

Add an orphan to abuse and you get anger. Add murder to his head and you get violence, insanity - hatred.

It is not so terrible of the insane to go insane in the first place. So yes, dear reader, I do not turn away at the first sign of bloodlust in this boy born from damnation. I do not look and see evil; I see consequences.

I see a difference in morality that humanity is unable to comprehend, living in self-righteous happiness, slaving over ideals that we do not truly keep but only make a mockery of. I see honesty and bared souls scratching at their cases.

You may see evil, you may sniff in disdain, but this boy is only human - just as human as can be.

Truthfully, he is a little more human than you and me.

So no, I cannot condemn him. No, I cannot turn him away. Dear reader, he is just a boy born of vengeance.

Let him have his fun.)

The school saw his arms, scabbed and scarred and stared death in the face to tell him to stop. To bring him to his knees in absolution.

He just snarled and turned his head 'round. The teachers never taught, never cared and never fought - for him. Unlike Tom, his voice.

They never cared until his arms bloodied their tables. They never cared until his crooked grin sent shudders down their back. They never cared until he began to unsettle them.

They never cared for him, only for themselves. Assuaging their guilt through half-assed soothing words and broken psychology tricks.

Tom, though, Tom was always there. There to whisper comfort and make him smile, listing deaths and acts of human depravity like they were merely talking about the weather. Yes, Harry smiled at that voice that comforted him, that made his toes curl in excitement at the low droll that sung of bloodied skin and broken bones. For Harry was raised in darkness, in cobwebbed corners and cramped walls where spiders scuttled over skin and he watched his life fade slowly down.

If one were to watch oneself decay would one really be so scared of death? The concept itself became invigorating and he relished in his pain.

The voice taught him the pleasure of self-harm and chuckled in glee at his red washed walls. Harry loved to hear Tom's laughs, basking in the praise of the only one who ever cared.

He didn't find it wrong at all to please Tom through his pain. He was too far gone for that - never really truly there in the first place.

(How can one be sane if they have never experienced sanity?)

Then the letters come and bring a world that Harry had thought was only a pipe dream. But Tom was right - like always - and he was famous and magic and special and that made the voice happy so he was happy.

He was really very happy.

His hands wove bloody lines upon the dirt on the floor. They were gnarled bones and warped skin splayed in vicious claws - scratching, tearing. His birthday was today, a day of birth and absolution. A day of death and bloody babes breathing the crisp and cutting air of life. It was a day for celebration and in his hands, he held his prize. It was power and thrummed an ache against his soul, piercing through time to unite him with his destiny. What was this of prophecy? Of souls entwined for eternity?

Too broken, too incomplete, their souls were nothing but madness; they fit alongside each other like jagged shards of glass. One cannot live while the other survives? Why, of course not. They must live together and tear apart the world underneath their bloody fists, plowing fields of varicose veins upon the landscapes of all the continents - the world.

"Great man, Dumbledore," Hagrid said, and Harry smiled a sharp-toothed and mocking grin because great men didn't exist. Great men were often terrible ones hidden under grandfatherly grins and kind smiles.

Oh, how Harry hated pretenders.

Great men, though… why not - powerful men? Powerful people who hold the globe in their palm and smash it within clenched fists. For Harry and Tom were powerful people who could crush the world to dirt underneath their heels. They could topple buildings with their eyes closed and rain blood upon the pavement like water - washing away the sins of goodness, of purity.

They would taint the world and Harry was happy. Happy with his broken fingernails and bloody gums dripping crimson onto stained teeth. Happy with his flayed skin holding onto his muscles by a thread. Harry was happy because he could feel Tom smirk within his mind when the holly wood of his wand hummed in his hand. Harry was happy because the door to his room shattered with a flick of his wand and a thought.

Harry was happy because the upstanding citizens of No. 4 Privet Drive were cowering at his feet with bloody wrists and shattered bones.

His belly was heavy with raw meat and his scabbed lips were relieved of their chapped skin when he drank the tap water from the sink. Did they expect a boy who had to scream his will upon his relatives to receive water to be sane? Did they expect normality from this shadow of a soul, this dark and heavy boy of pain?

Would they see the murder in his eyes, the way he snapped necks with but a thought? This was a boy who killed to survive - a boy who swam in blood and watched the sky crust red with a soaring heart.

This was a boy who lusted for the explosion of a thousand souls; who ached for the freeing cacophony of tortured screams and found bliss in the drip-drop of blood flowing heavy from open wounds.

This was a boy carved by madness and sculpted by the words of a psychopath. This was a boy raised in slaughter, walking slowly to his own.

This was a boy born of pain.

* * *

Tom whispered words, whispered songs, whispered hurts. Tom whispered spells, whispered of the pleasantries of hell. And Harry?

Harry listened well.


End file.
